In certain role-playing video games, players control the actions of one or more characters, with the objective of developing unique character profiles that accumulate various objects and abilities through extended play. The rules for how quickly, how many, and what type of abilities are obtained and/or how quickly, how many, and what type of objects a character may find or receive involve several different variables, ratings or statistics, collectively parameters. These parameters determine the outcome of various chance or future events that lead to new objects and abilities.
The proper selection of these parameters is very challenging, however. First, video games may have an endpoint where the user's enjoyment stagnates because the user has achieved the biggest challenge possible or has used all of the assets available to him or her in achieving an objective. Users also have a tendency to be discouraged if they do not win or acquire any assets in a few consecutive games, if they perceive a game level to be too complex, or if the game rewards are not forthcoming. Additionally, some players are not always engaged, playing only intermittently. Especially in the smart device market segment, players are very time sensitive and tend to skip or switch to another game, application, channel or webpage whenever they do not feel sufficiently engaged with a game. As such, the improper selection of parameters may lead to a player becoming unengaged because they do not win or acquire any assets, they perceive a game level to be too complex, or the game rewards are not forthcoming.
Second, to properly engage users, the reward system of a video game must be fair and consistent. The improper selection of parameters can easily skew the reward system of a game by giving new users too many assets, at the expense of established users or vice-versa, by granting too many tokens, awards, objects, or abilities to one subset of users relative to another subset of users, or by assigning too much, or too little, value to a particular actions, challenge, objective or object. If the reward system of a game becomes corrupted in this fashion, players tend to feel the game is unfair, leading to disengagement.
Third, the selection of parameters should still preserve the randomness of value creation and activities within a game, thereby avoiding any express or implicit favoring of one subset of players relative to another, while still limiting the randomness to being within certain bounds, thereby avoiding excessively large, or small, rewards.
Thus, there is a need for methods and systems that can assist video game developers in designing video games that maximize user engagement and retention by proactively modeling the effect of certain gaming parameters within a game. There is also a need for methods and systems that can assist video game developers in predicting how a plurality of gaming parameters will affect the reward system of a game, user engagement and user retention. It is also desired that such a system is easily accessible to the developers and provides a user friendly interface.